Brookfield - For the love of a dog: a memoir of meltdown, recovery, and a Golden Doodle

AN ANIMA BOOK

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When her mother dies and a post-divorce relationship goes wrong Amanda Brookfield finds herself felled by despair. Misery destroys self-confidence, she discovers, as well as the ability to laugh, or to think straight.

The idea of getting a puppy begins as something to talk about other than her own bleakness. Nothing about her way of life suggests suitability for dog-ownership, as all her friends agree.But somehow the conversations gather momentum and Mabel, a rambunctious, eye-poppingly beautiful eight-week-old Golden Doodle enters her life. Enchanted, terrified, Amanda decides that if she reads enough dog books and buys enough dog equipment she will be up to the challenge.

Instead, it quickly becomes apparent that the journey with Mabel is to be about much more than having the right kit. Between grappling with her new responsibilities Amanda is assailed by tender and sometimes difficult reflections on the turn her life has taken. Soon she realises that, in falling for Mabel and learning how to look after her, she is also inching towards a new understanding of herself.

For Amanda R

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

From Love after Love by Derek Walcott

A couple of years ago my mother died. She was eighty-one, grumpily frustrated with old age and not in tip-top health, but it was a terrible shock. She could still drive, but on the fateful day she was out shopping with a carer, the one she really liked (one grasps at such small mercies), when she suddenly announced she felt a bit queasy. She had a sit-down, but once they were back in the car she began to slur her words. Thanks to her quick-thinking companion, an ambulance was there in fifteen minutes, but soon after getting to hospital Mum slipped into a coma. The doctors said she had suffered a massive brain haemorrhage and didnt have long. My siblings and I, scattered round the UK, hared down motorways and rail tracks to get to her bedside, but only my eldest sister made it in time. When I arrived Mum was still warm, just, but so utterly departed. It was my first time with a dead body. They are not so easy to hug.

A good death in many ways, therefore. There was no fear, no trauma to speak of. She had someone with her, someone who cared and knew what to do. It had been a bright, happy morning. They had been to the bank, the butchers, the farm shop a farewell tour, as it turned out, of all her favourite local haunts, places where she was known and talked to and made to feel at home. A good end to a good innings (the platitudes come thick and fast). If I could make an advance booking of a similarly peaceful end for myself, I would. Indeed, it was one of those endings that one might, reasonably, be tempted to call a blessing. Mum certainly would have. She had an offon, mostly on, relationship with God and was very into blessings. But the thing about grief is it isnt logical. It blasts a hole inside you, one that heals or not in its own good time.

When you lose the second parent it was twenty years since Dads death you lose the first all over again. Nothing had prepared me for this. They were such a devoted pair. Dad had lived on in her, through her, keeping us connected to him. Now without Mum we were, in the truest sense, orphans. And yet what luxury not to be orphaned until ones sixth decade! Talk about First World problems. I knew that. Or at least my brain did. My heart had other ideas. Losing Mum was like losing a chunk of my past, the anchor to my beginnings, the storage chest of family history, the ballast to us all.

I am not the sort of person people expect to fall apart. More to the point, I am not the sort of person I expect to fall apart. My life, troughs and peaks notwithstanding, has been and remains so fortunate. Health, wonderful children, solvency (I am touching wood as I type the troughs and peaks teach caution), modest literary success, a musical ear, a panoply of fantastic friends the list is an embarrassment of riches. Yes, loved ones have died a couple of close friends, dear Mum of course, my sweet niece, cruelly lost when she was only five, and darling Dad, long before he was ready to go (he would never have been ready to go) and the collapse of my marriage after twenty-six years certainly wasnt in my original game plan or something I would recommend for those seeking a stress-free existence. But I have always bounced back. That is my thing. Bouncing. Being positive. Ms Find-The-Silver-Lining, cest moi .

So no one was more shocked than me when, one sunny spring day the year following Mums death, I broke down. And I mean that quite literally: falling onto my knees, unable to breathe, howling. Even as my legs buckled I knew this was the real deal, that I was in the most major trouble of my life, that no silver linings were available, no matter how hard I rummaged in my cupboard of learned wisdom or scrutinized the horizon. The trigger was the end of a new relationship in which I had invested all my hopes. The man changed his mind. The word heartbreak is so hackneyed, but on that spring day I understood it for the first time. My chest exploded, taking my brain with it. Smithereens. Bomb fragments. The physical pain was extraordinary and impossible to imagine ever finding an end. Grieving for my mother, I had felt as if I had lost my past. Now, with this new sorrow, it was as if I had lost my future too.

It is hard not to sound melodramatic it seems so now to the sane version of me looking back at the insane but as I collapsed onto the floor of my study, animal sounds coming from some place I had not known I possessed, it was the fear of my despair that was almost as bad as the despair itself. To be capable of such a total lack of hope. It was terrifying. Without hope there is no point to anything. I crawled to the window and looked out. My house is tall and my study is on the first floor, with big low sash windows overlooking a stone patio.

Any novelist will tell you that even in the white heat of emotion there is an element inside that watches. We are the observers of the world, so we learn to observe ourselves. It is our job. Yet pressing my face against my study window that day, there was no part of me watching. I was too lost. I saw only the patio below the smeared glass under my fingertips. It wasnt concrete, but it was stone. Hard enough, surely, to do a decent job.

No, a stray puppy did not come romping into view from a neighbouring garden, a tail-wagging bundle of joy that made me see life was worth living after all. Art can conjure such handy twists, but Life takes a little longer to sort out. In my case, my eye-line also happened to be level with my phone, perched on the end of my desk. I am proudly un-needy confessing to sadness has always felt tantamount to admitting to failure but I lunged for my mobile much as a drowning person might grab at a piece of driftwood. The most recent number was my eldest sisters, so I pressed that, even though I was incapable of speech and had no expectation of an answer since I knew she was at work, hectic as always.